Quebecor Inc.’s Sun Media division is shutting down the
Montreal Mirror, the city’s last remaining English alternative weekly
newspaper.

Montreal was once home to a vibrant alt-weekly community,
with four newspapers in two languages circulating on the streets.

The rich competition in cultural and alternative journalism
that Montreal fostered in the early 1990s also gave birth to Vice Magazine - a
now-international media corporation once called Voice of Montreal, now
headquartered in New York.

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Now there remains only one alternative weekly -
French-language Voir. The city’s other English alternative weekly, Hour
Community – formerly named the Hour – was shut down just last month.

The paper’s shutdown came down with no warning. Patrick
Lejtenyi, the paper’s news editor, said editor-in-chief Alastair Sutherland met
with Quebecor representatives at 10:30 Friday morning to break the news. Staff
were given a few hours to gather their things. Some staff were on out of the
office for the Saint Jean Baptiste holiday,and had to be called to break the news.

Mr. Lejtenyi called the situation “amicable, as far as
these things go.”

While the announcement was sudden, hints of the paper’s
financial strain were not. Sections disappeared, page counts were down, and
freelance budgets dwindled, pressuring editorial staff to take on more reporting
themselves.

“Tough times are all over,” Mr. Lejtenyi said, “but I thought
we'd done enough to buy us some more time.”

By 2 p.m. Friday the Mirror website directed to a short
statement from the paper’s editors.

“It is with great regret that we recently stopped publishing
the Montreal Mirror,” the statement reads. “The June 22 edition of the free
Montreal English-language cultural weekly will be its last.

“The growing popularity of digital media and communications
has irremediably changed the context in which free cultural weeklies operate,
bringing about economic challenges which have unfortunately compromised The
Mirror’s viability.

“We wish to thank all the readers, advertisers, writers and
staff whose passion and talent contributed to making the Mirror a true Montreal
cultural and journalistic institution.”

Some of the note’s phrasing is identical to that of a news
release issued by Sun Media Friday afternoon. An earlier note from the editors
has since been removed: “Maintaining a free cultural weekly in this context
simply became unviable.”

J. Serge Sasseville, Quebecor’s senior vice-president of
corporate and institutional affairs, declined to provide further comment on the
matter.

Catherine Salisbury co-founded the Mirror and now serves
as president of The Coast, Halifax’s alt-weekly. “We started the Mirror back in
1985 to give a voice to our community and fought for years for its survival,”
she said. “It was always a grass roots operation and we ran the newspaper with
sincerity and passion.

“Perhaps Quebecor and The Mirror was not the perfect fit.”
Quebecor bough the Mirror in 1997.

“The Mirror was an original and raw voice in English Montreal
at a time when the conversation was dominated by the Gazette,” said Peter
Scowen, a Globe and Mail web editor who served as editor-in-chief of both Mirror
and Hour at different times during the 1990s. "It’s hard to believe that
Montreal can’t support one English-language alt weekly any more.”

Julien Feldman, one of the paper’s co-founders who left in
the early years, said he watched the paper struggle to adapt to the Internet
age, focusing on being a newspaper rather than a media company.

“As a co-founder, that’s particularly sad for me,” he said.
He cited Vice, whose print and digital properties have garnered international
reach, as an example of the success the Mirror never attained. Now, he said, the
Mirror is “in the scrap heap of history.”

The Mirror’s current issue, featuring Vancouver band
Japandroids on the cover, will be its last.

It first published in 1985.

The newspaper’s Twitter feed was last updated Thursday, and
all links to stories redirected to the Mirror editors’ note.

Seven employees will be laid off, according to Sun Media,
while two others will move elsewhere within the company.

“We’re all still reeling from this,” Mr. Lejtenyi said.
“We’d all like to keep writing and keep reporting, but I doubt we’ll find
anywhere that was as fun or as cool. It was really an exceptional little
paper.”

Ottawa’s XPress alt-weekly, which shares a publisher,
Urbacom, with Montreal’s Voir, also stopped publishing this May. Like the
Mirror, the financial impossibility of running a print newspaper was cited as
its reason for shutting down.

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